Senior Pre-Sales Systems Engineer (Higher Education)

Location: Remote, Maryland or Virginia, United States

Annual base salary: $141,400–$212,100 USD. The role may also be eligible for incentive pay and/or equity.

Company

hirify.global is a data platform company serving hyperscalers, AI labs, the AI hardware supply chain, data platform providers, and the broader AI ecosystem.

What you will do

• Act as the technical lead for higher education accounts, especially R1 research universities, and connect the hirify.global portfolio and broader ecosystem to measurable research and institutional outcomes.
• Understand institutional research priorities, funding cycles, capital and operating constraints, decision-makers, and purchasing processes.
• Adapt technical and business conversations for principal investigators, research computing teams, central IT, CIOs, finance, procurement, executives, architects, engineers, and data scientists.
• Build technical and financial business cases covering total cost of ownership, power and cooling, data center footprint, staff time, and current-environment costs.
• Support research workloads from instrument and sequencer output through HPC and AI pipelines to long-term retention and archive, including lifecycle, reproducibility, data sharing, governance, and security requirements such as NIST 800-171 and CMMC.
• Lead evaluations, benchmarks, proofs of concept, configurations, technical wins, requirements capture, RFI/RFP/RFQ responses, competitive positioning, and collaboration with account managers, specialists, partners, and higher education purchasing consortia.

Requirements

• 8 or more years of relevant experience across technology, solution design, and customer-facing communication.
• Pre-sales or customer-facing technical experience.
• Experience with higher education, research computing, academic medical centers, or the public sector.
• Familiarity with HPC and AI environments, including parallel and distributed file systems, GPU-attached storage, schedulers such as Slurm, and data pipelines for genomics, imaging, or simulation.
• Broad technical depth across at least two of cloud, HPC, AI and machine learning infrastructure, data management, core infrastructure, analytics, or financial and business applications; experience built entirely inside storage is not sufficient.
• Track record of selling on value by connecting customer objectives to business, operational, and financial outcomes.
• Ability to communicate credibly with technical, executive, research, finance, and procurement audiences and adapt the message for each.
• Comfort with ambiguity, judgment to challenge assumptions, curiosity, empathy, an open mind, and continuous-learning mindset.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and a BS in CS, EE, another technical degree, or equivalent experience.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of storage architectures including FC, iSCSI, NAS, SAN, object storage, and file systems.
• Linux, NFS, distributed Linux environments, VMware, Ethernet, TCP/IP, and general networking.
• AWS, Azure, or GCP and hybrid or cloud-native architectures.
• Containers, Kubernetes, and microservices.
• Data-intensive applications such as SQL, Oracle, and analytics platforms.
• Grant-funded procurement, consortium purchasing, or public sector contract vehicles.
• Higher education, research computing, or academic medical center experience.
• HPC, research, and AI environment experience, including parallel and distributed file systems, GPU-attached storage, Slurm, and genomics, imaging, or simulation data pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Values include Persistence, Creativity, Teamwork, Ownership, and customer-first behavior.
• Culture emphasizes innovation, critical thinking, challenging work, growth, inclusion, and teamwork without ego.
• Benefits include flexible time off, wellness resources, and company-sponsored team events.
• Employee Resource Groups and inclusive leadership support a strong and inclusive workplace.
• Accommodations are available for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process.

Hiring process

• Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis until the role is filled.
• Candidates invited to interviews may request accommodations for all aspects of the hiring process.